Uh-Oh, theres another queen!
So remember that we had a hive under the hive? We took the hive apart to look at it and it was like this.
We also had some advice that another queen under here was unlikely since queens, bit like tomcats, don’t fancy living close by to each other. ‘Don’t worry, just merge them all together!’ but after a closer look there was brood and larvae in there, so a queen was present. Bit of a surprise and presented a bit of a conundrum, especially as there was a queen up top, we had seen her earlier. We couldn’t put the bees into our hive, and we didn’t have another hive to put them in. After a while of thinking and much photo taking by the bevy of other beekeepers who had turned up by now, some head scratching and much discussion, we decided to put the bees in to a NUC box. A NUC is like a cat carrier for bees, but quite small, with no windows and very temporary. In order to put the bees into the NUC you had to shake the bees in. So, we said to Hubby, just shake the bees into that box. Now Hubby wasn’t very keen on this plan but by now all of us had stepped back further and were issuing instructions. Just do it, just shake them in!
This wasn’t actually quite so easy for hubby as we soon realised. The comb that the bees had made was very soft and malleable. It collapsed easily so we then decided to scrape it off bit by bit using the hive tool and dumping it into the NUC box. So this bit turned into a bit of a Crystal Maze episode with all the beekeepers standing back and hubby attempting to put the soft and collapsing comb, covered in increasingly grumpy bees into a box, luckily with no chance of automatic lock in.
This is the thinking and planning bit!
A bit more thinking and a bit of fiddling about
Starting to scrape the comb off
This is moving the comb into the NUC
A bit of shaking!
Bees are installed into the NUC box!
We have to wait and see now. There is a chance the queen didn’t make it into the NUC, we have to return to check in a few days.